Signal Transmission and Crosstalk Limited All-Optical Networks

Abstract

Over the last few decades, optical fiber has become the transmission medium of choice because it provides efficient high data rate transmission at low Bit Error Rate. The optical fiber has a potential capacity of terabits-per-second. Modern commercial transport systems are capable of operating at 10 Gb/s with experimental system clocking 40 Gb/s and 100 Gb/s performance. The present transport networks cannot sustain such a high data rate of terabits-per-second. The fiber dispersion, fiber nonlinearities and electronic switching used in present transport networks, are the main limiting factors. A new generation of optical networks known as ‘All-Optical-Networks (AONs)' overcomes this limitation by switching data entirely optically using Optical Switches. However AONs are prone to phenomena known as ‘node crosstalk'. This chapter discusses the propagation of light in optical fibers, linear as well as nonlinear impairments and the effects of dispersion & fiber nonlinearities on the system performance of crosstalk limited AONs.

Key Terms in this Chapter

Optical Switches: Switches which do not require optical to electrical conversions for switching the data from one fiber to another.

Modulation Formats: An encoding techniques for imposing information on a light carrier.

Fiber Nonlinearities: Nonlinear characteristics exhibit by fiber medium.

Fiber Attenuation: Fall in the magnitude of the signal as it propagates over a fiber.

Dispersion: Spreading of optical pulses in time domain.

All-Optical Networks (AONs): Optical networks where there is no need of conversion of optical signal to electrical signal at intermediate nodes.